Partial progress, but now all firmwares fail on dlink dwl-650p

[Jouni Malinen]

On Sun, Jan 14, 2007 at 12:45:29PM +0000, re2823 at Safe-mail.net wrote:

> I'm now trying to work out what to do next. If I try to bring up the
> interface (ifconfig wlan0 up), the command fails silently (on the
> command line) but the following is appended to the syslog:
> 
> kernel: wlan0: could not set interface UP - no PRI f/w

See hostap_fw_load in hostap-utils for an example script that loads the
needed firmware files.

> 1) Am i going about this the right way?

More or less, but the exact prism2_srec commands may not have been
correct.

> 2) Which firmware file should I use and, more importantly, how do you
> know/how am I supposed to find out?

Well.. Either one "just knows" the coding mechanism Intersil used for
the file names to indicate which card type they were for or one can try
with prism2_srec whether any given firmware image is suitable (before
asking it to actually download it). In case of D-Link DWL-650 Rev P1 the
files are PM*.HEX as the primary firmware and RF*.HEX as the
secondary/STA firmeare.

> 3) How come there's no "master list" of firmwares vs. pci/pcmcia card id
> (this is really linked to question 2).

There is documentation for this, but not publicly available.. I would
assume that someone has made such a list available somewhere, though.

> 4) Is this supposed to be this difficult? Shouldn't this all be setup as
> a udev rule, or some suitable pcmcia equivalent, so that plugging in my
> pcmcia produces a useable wifi interface? (see question 3!)

Well.. This was done before udev, if I remember correctly and anyway,
all that is needed is running "hostap_fw_load wlan0". I believe this was
discussed long time ago on this list (i.e., is archived somewhere) with
examples on how to do this automatically with cardmgr.

I'm not familiar with udev, so I don't know how to do this with more
modern kernels, but if someone is interested in doing that and
documenting the process, I can add the document somewhere..

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA